Social music festival brandscapes: A lexical analysis of music festival social conversations

Abstract Social media usage relative to music festivals has given rise to the Social Music Festival Brandscape (SMFB)—an ecosystem of festival experiences and social conversations where music festival brand value is co-created through discussions of festival experiences and attendances, artist performance celebrations, and evaluation of festival purchase exchanges. The present study applied machine learning-based lexical analysis to the ten largest U.S.-based music festivals and their communities across Instagram and Twitter and revealed post theme types of Time, Artists, Media, Location, Purchase Exchanges, Gratitude, Priming, Social Media Inducements, and Genre References to round out value co-creation activity within the Dialogue Zone of the SMFB model. Of particular note is that while these content themes emerged holistically in the SMFB dialogue, content theme misalignment occurred between festivals and communities where Media, Gratitude, and Priming content theme posts lacked the same frequency across community posts. Understanding the content of these dialogues within SMFBs is important for music festivals moving forward as they seek to build, re-establish, or re-trench music communities in the festival experience, and to determine if post theme misalignment is necessary for longer term, successful SMFB dialogue.